Abstract
While there is a tradition of viewing both craftwork and entrepreneurship as characteristically individualistic and autonomous activities, this article examines the way in which social ties of family and kinship are often integral to many entrepreneurial ventures. Instead of a neat divide between ‘separate spheres’, work and home permeate each other in meaningful ways. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 workers from UK craft gin distilleries, this article explores how kinship and intimacy are put to work in craft enterprises. Findings show that the involvement of family and kin is vital to the operations of many craft businesses. Working together with spouses and siblings brings benefits and challenges and involves negotiating task and role allocation, often through invoking heteronormative notions of suitability and complementarity. Such concerns are bound up with how family and kin are understood by participants. Their reflections on entrepreneurial kinship involve both narratives of work and visions of a lifestyle which are both familial and entrepreneurial.
Highlights
Entrepreneurial labour has been described as an expression of selfhood and individual identity (Bröckling, 2015) which is supported by a widely accepted ‘cultural myth’ that the domains of work and family are distinct and separate (Fitzgerald and Muske, 2002)
As part of debates which have sought to challenge this dichotomous separation of work and non-work spheres (Land and Taylor, 2010; Smith Maguire, 2017), there has been a move to explore the ‘increasingly porous’ boundaries between the personal and professional lives of entrepreneurs (Wee and Brooks, 2012, p. 574) and to better understand the ways in which some occupational cultures ‘strongly value the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, and between friends and formal work relations’ (Cederholm & Åkerström, 2016, p. 751)
Because craftwork is by its nature an expressive and immersive activity (O’Connor, 2010), studies of craft enterprises are well placed to examine the ways in which craft entrepreneurs understand their own investment in their work and how such involves an intermingling of professional and personal identity
Summary
Entrepreneurial labour has been described as an expression of selfhood and individual identity (Bröckling, 2015) which is supported by a widely accepted ‘cultural myth’ that the domains of work and family are distinct and separate (Fitzgerald and Muske, 2002). This article adds to this recent drive to understand work and workplace relationships as important loci for the interconnection of work and non-work identities by drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with twenty craft drinks entrepreneurs in the UK. As many of these businesses are established and run in partnership between spouses, siblings or close friends, the article analyses craft enterprise not as a highly individualistic undertaking, but as a site in which occupational values, personal identity and interpersonal intimacies or, following Mason (2018), ‘affinities’ become animated. A concluding discussion will explore how, for these craft entrepreneurs, family and kinship are experienced as part of their work and not separate to it, and how working together provides situations and experiences through which personal relationships with spouses and siblings become experienced and enriched, and commodified as a resource within the operations of the enterprise
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